Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 6.5. With this release we continue to enhance and improve Black Lab Linux for public consumption. While the base is the same, the Open Distribution Release comes in four flavors. GNOME, MATE, XFCE and KDE. The XFCE release is built into the GNOME release because of customer demand. Some of our users run things like legacy 64-bit hardware, terminal services and certain systems where GNOME may not run all that great.

Since last year the NVIDIA Linux binary graphics driver has exposed the NVENC API for GPU-based video encode support. FFmpeg has supported NVENC for offloading the encode job to newer NVIDIA graphics processors and now they've extended that code to support H.265 encoding on the GPU...

I have a Toshiba with an ATI Radeon x1200 video card.. which is what I'm assuming is causing this issue. I first was using Ubuntu 12.10 fine, but then decided to upgrade to 14.10 LTS and that's where the issue with the flickering started. Then I decided to give Mint a try to see if that'd work, but with no luck.

KDE had the pleasure of announcing today, March 24, the immediate availability of the second maintenance release for its KDE Plasma 5.2 desktop environment. This necessary update brings small, yet important bug fixes that promise to improve the overall performance and stability of the KDE Plasma 5 interface.

The FSF has thousands of members; why do people dismiss it entirely just because they consider RMS unusual/eccentric? Do they not realize how important the FSF's principles are or how instrumental they have been?

Our last poll, in which our readers picked their favorite programming lanaguage for beginners, had almost 30 comments and 2,300 votes. And, it's still open for voting! Python leads C/C+ and Javascript, and a few others, with over 1,000 votes.read more

Red Eclipse is a free, open-source first-person shooter based upon the Cube 2 engine, with both single-player and multi-player support. It’s a fantasy shooter that bundles a very large number of maps and comes with modes such as DM, CTF or Defend and Control. For some reason, the game always gives me a feeling of calm, and the music theme is really great. So let’s take a brief look at this new version.

I've recently decided to switch from VirtualBox to KVM and have had a tremendous amount of ups and downs. I finally managed to get my extra graphics card passed through, so that's a plus. Now with PCI passthrough, obviously the PCI slot is ignored by the host; shouldn't USB act similarly though? I've passed a usb Xbox dongle through to the VM and installed the drivers for it, but out of curiousity I decided to look at the output of lsusb. Sure enough it's still showing up in the host. Will I need to remove xboxdrv from the active modules to be able to use my gamepad in the VM?

Today, the open source model is much better understood, and organisations are considering it as vital to the future of digital business and government services. A recent survey found that more than 50% of respondents are moving into the open source space.

More in Tux Machines

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

Clonezilla Live 2.4.0-7 Released to Fix a Btrfs Issue, Based on Debian Sid

Steven Shiau has released a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system aimed at system administrators who want an easy-to-use, portable, and straightforward solution for cloning disk drives.

Lumina Desktop 0.8.3 Released!

The next version of the Lumina Desktop Environment has just been released!
This is mainly a bugfix release to correct an urgent issue with the system tray on FreeBSD 11, but there are a number of other slight improvements/updates included as well. The full list of changes is included at the bottom of this announcement, but the notable changes are as follows:
New Panel Plugin: “Application Launcher“
This allows the user to pin the shortcut for an application directly to a panel.
New Utility: “lumina-xconfig“
This utility allows the user to easily enable/disable additional monitors/screens within the desktop session.
Fix the issue with transparent system tray icons on FreeBSD 11
Add support for the XDG autostart specifications.